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Physicists Spot Potential Source of 'Oh-My-God' Particles
sciencehabit (1205606) writes For decades, physicists have sought the sources of the most energetic subatomic particles in the universe — cosmic rays that strike the atmosphere with as much energy as well-thrown baseballs. Now, a team working with the Telescope Array, a collection of 507 particle detectors covering 700 square kilometers of desert in Utah, has observed a broad 'hotspot' in the sky in which such cosmic rays seem to originate. Although not definitive, the observation suggests the cosmic rays emanate from a distinct source near our galaxy and not from sources spread all over the universe.
I have an idea backed only by my imagination.
What if those galaxies are proof of symetry, and they're some of the few that are made of both matter and anti-matter, and the high energy ejections we're seeing are from that collision. Maybe half the galaxies in the sky are made of anti-matter and the non-particle-scale properties of antimatter are otherwise identical to matter.
It's Galactus. And not the crappy one from the movie.
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
It would be really cool if we discovered these particles were actually packets of alien data. I mean if WE found a new civ and we decided to contact them I wonder how they would adapt to our technology. Wouldn't it present in a kind of similar way?
Because if these particles are pretty special, which they are, then can we not assume they might not be naturally occurring?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Just saying what we're all thinking.
For those of us scientists who hold Christ-gods and sky friends as important in our lives as an empty roll of shit-tickets or takeaway flyers:
God Particle: the Higgs Boson.
Oh-My-God Particle: ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (most likely a proton) detected on the evening of 15 October 1991 over Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
other particles we find similar to it could be given normal names like UHE particles, or super high energy rays but that doesnt secure grant funding in the theocratic Mormon state of Utah.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Buy the book BANNED by Costco!
Buy the book that Google can't seem to find in their search engine!
America!
http://www.dineshdsouza.com/news/
"Dinesh D’Souza, in response to the news of Costco removing his latest book, America: Imagine A World Without Her, from its shelves, made the following statement on July 8.
Today, I was stunned to learn that Costco had pulled my latest book, America: Imagine A World Without Her, from all of its stores. This was despite the fact that the book had sold very well at the chain and that my movie of the same name was releasing on over 1,000 screens the very next day. Today, I am disappointed to learn that this news has been confirmed by Costco. This action confirms the suspicions of all freedom-loving Americans and is a direct attack on my livelihood which I take very seriously.
In a free society, Costco is free to ban my book, but their customers are also free to shop at other stores which don’t censor books. In the book and the movie, I talk about the shaming of Americans and a culture of intimidation and censorship that has been spearheaded by the President himself. It’s one thing for Costco executives to pal around with President Obama and donate almost exclusively to Democrats. But to turn their company into a tool for suppressing dissent against the government is another matter.
I urge all Americans to watch our film in their nearest theater and buy the book from an establishment that honors freedom of speech. Once they do that, they will understand why the President and his allies are so afraid of this message and determined to keep it from reaching the American people."
Or is it actually true that you people are too lazy to read anything that is longer than a blog post?
Running ther reactors without shielding.
Have gnu, will travel.
Actual scientists... people with PhDs... are creating names like "Oh-My-God" . What's next, "veribifaction" in physics education?
Professor: "So I totally EyeJammed my telescope and galactified my research. I thought I was peepin' down a R.D. but really it was a 2nary star, bitches!"
has observed a broad 'hotspot' in the sky in which such cosmic rays seem to originate
Cosmic Rays? Or just global warming?
WTF is "as much energy as well-thrown baseballs"?
Religious scientist is like saying technophobic blogger.
thank you, because here i was thinking the naming of the OMG particle related to sex!
ed
Its aliens who have created an Ion drive capable of accelerating Hydrogen ions to near speed of light.. - Giving an almost limitless supply of thrust. What we are seeing is pollution from the thrusters!
WTF is "as much energy as well-thrown baseballs"?
That should technically be something like "as much kinetic energy as a well-thrown baseball". In other words, about 50 joules: what you get from a baseball at about 60 miles per hour. So, not major-league fastball fast (90+ mph) but quite a respectable velocity.
And we're not going to talk about assorted forms of chemical or nuclear potential energy in the baseball. If you set fire to a baseball, you could get quite a bit more thermal energy. And you could get a heck of a lot more energy out of a baseball if you fused all its component atoms down to iron.
~Idarubicin
The particle's energy is equivalent to an American baseball travelling fifty-five miles an hour
Take the energy of a baseball thrown at 90-something miles per hour. Now instead apply that energy to a single proton. That's an awful, awful lot of energy for one tiny particle.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Idiocracy... it's not just a funny movie, it is the future.
No kidding, it should have been in the internationally accepted furlongs per fortnight.
No brain, no pain.
Somewhere in the ballpark (hur hur) of 140 Joules each
In high school I could throw a fastball at 75 mph. I got recruited by Bama but they rescinded the offer when I hurt my elbow in a skateboarding accident.
Obligatory:
http://xkcd.com/603/
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
This what I come to Slashdot for.
I use to be a baseball player, then I took a skateboard to the elbow.
I've been laughing at this (pdf) for days now. The lower right pic on the second page gets me every time.
Can anyone comment on how this impacts the theory these were coming from Cygnus X-3:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~rene/talks/Cronin-Fest-Ong-Writeup.pdf
It's only wage-slave click-baiting modern journalists who are responsible for this. It only takes one scientists to slip up and use a funny or sensational nickname for a particle (which will happen eventually), and then these media idiots run with it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The problem is your own bigotry - why do you assume that real scientists - people with PHDs - are somehow not human? Guess what - scientists fart too! They even make fart jokes! Scientists also snort when they eat, scratch their balls, argue with their wives and kids, bitch at/about their neighbors and are even known to drink beer in the backyard while having a barbecue! Scientists can and do listen to opera, rock, country western, rap, hip hop and everything in between.
Youre a pretentious asshole. No one is obligated to live out your preconceived bigotries to your expectations.
The unit of energy is fff, the energy required to accelerate one firkin by one furlong-per-fortnight.
Steerriikke!
That's purely a velocity measure, to include the energy you need to include the mass.
So it's "hogs heads * (furlongs/fornight)^2"
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
or perhaps it's from a stargate
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The "Oh, Yes! Particle?"
The "Yes, Right There Particle?"
The "OOOOOOOOHOHHHHH Particle?"
They have a nice graphic here of the OMG particle hitting the atmosphere.
http://www.spaceanswers.com/deep-space/what-is-the-omg-particle/
"veribifaction"?? If you're going to make up words, at least try to make the derivation clear. What's a "veribi"?
Actual scientists... people with PhDs... are creating names like "Oh-My-God".
You need to meet more people with doctorates.
Many of them are actual people with senses of whimsy and humour. It's not like they joined some sort of academic cult and were turned into mindless zombies.
Not that that doesn't happen, but it's not part of the PhD process. Many people are able to survive academic life and still think that thagomizer is a perfectly fine name for the spikes on the end of a Stegosaurus's tail.
Oh, but where it gets real funny is if you don't take the kinetic energy of a baseball and transfer it to a single proton, but where you take the impulse of a baseball and transfer it to a proton.
Now that is a fun proton gun to wield on a baseball field and should confuse the hell out of a batter when you direct it against, well, a flying baseball. Though it would likely cause different problems than just pushing baseballs off-course.
Because the energy of such a proton would be quite intimidating...
The particle's energy is equivalent to an American baseball travelling fifty-five miles an hour
How much is that in Volkswagens? And how fast is it travelling relative to imperial standard sheep? Can you measure the kinetic energy in terms of double-decker busses?
... in the "tiny universe" experimenter's particle accelerator.
Hmm... Energetic particles hitting Earth, originating from a single location in the sky... Someone is obviously trying to throw a rock through our window.
fuck off kid.
someone saw something moving at nearly the speed of light packing the energy of a fast moving baseball at 20 odd something orders of magnitude it's mass... and you don't think OMG is an appropriate declaration?
this comment deserves recognition. please mod parent up :)
The media latches on to somethings and inflates their relevance, but in this case it is a term that physicists seem to use on their own, at least informally. Other cases such as the penguin diagram named after a bet and the tadpole diagram ended up being more formal names that are used regularly in publications.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
That's kindof BS...
Mass doesn't expand infinitely nor is there a speed threshold of energy as far as our current understanding of physics goes... This is a simplistic bookkeeping trick that attempts to account for limited acceleration near the speed of light (since F=ma, for a given force, you get less "a" if you somehow fudge 'm' to increase as you approach the speed of light). General relativity explains this much better by having any mass or energy actually distort space time so that you don't ever need this overly simplistic bookkeeping trick (which has unfortunate anomalies like rest-mass and photons having no rest mass, but momentum).
In your own frame of reference, you can accelerate as long as you have the energy to do so. The problem is that from an external observer's frame of reference despite your apparent acceleration from your frame of reference (you think you are going faster and faster), your time dilation factor relative to the observer means it doesn't observer you exceeding the speed of light, The observer thinks your acceleration (dv/dt) is asymptotically approaching zero as you approach the speed of light. Even though you have been accelerating all the time, you don't teleport relative to the observer (although the observer will think you were moving very, very fast, but not faster than light), but if you were to get back to the same frame of reference as the observer, you will have noticed your observer has experience quite a bit more time than you have (this is the origin of the twin paradox of special relativity).
From your special relatively frame of reference, you moved very fast (because you experienced less time for the distance you appeared to travel), but from the observers point of view, more time was experienced, so the velocity never exceed the speed of light. The way this is book-kept for is usually lorenzian length contraction. As you approach the speed of light the distance you observer to traverse over a unit of your time is shorter, so when you divide the distance by your time, you also don't observe that you went faster than the speed of light.
Of course if you could somehow create say a warp drive (or some other FTL transport), to a third party observer, you might appear to be in two places at once, and/or it would appear like time transport, but many folks thinks it is really possible to do this. Creating such a warp disturbance (actually warping space time around you) would likely require a very, very large, but not infinite amount of energy to maintain a negative energy-density around you. It is hypothesized you could not do this w/o some sort of pervasive zero-point energy source or creation of a type of exotic matter to sustain the required region of negative energy-density.
The vw beetle would be going less than 300 feet per hour. There's no such thing as a standard sheep. Your double-decker bus quip is just dumb.
No dumber than measuring energy in baseballs.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
For those of us who want to know where this is, from TFP:
A cluster of events appears in this map centered near right ascension 150 deg, and declination 40 deg, with a diameter of 30 deg–40 deg
What's that in European baseballs?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What exactly is a 20 degree radius? One wonders about that article.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us